


Wherever the Stars Take You

by crowsb4bros



Series: The Settlement of MOA-2011-BLG-262 [1]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ben does she like me or my cool office Solo, F/M, Rey hello im trying to flirt with you Johnson, Sci-Fi AU, Terraforming, paraterraforming, part two is the smut so, personal droids, that's the term for making the bubble environments instead of changing the atmosphere
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:55:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22802896
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crowsb4bros/pseuds/crowsb4bros
Summary: Ben Solo would follow Rey anywhere.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: The Settlement of MOA-2011-BLG-262 [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1639267
Comments: 6
Kudos: 29
Collections: Reylo Charity Anthology: Volume 2, Reylo Hidden Gems





	Wherever the Stars Take You

_“The climate change situation has become too dire to ignore. President Snoke’s tax cut proposal for massive corporations intent on destroying our environment for their own greed isn’t just corruption. It’s a crime against humanity!”_

Ben Solo watched on his holo as his mother delivered the speech directly to the camera, paused for effect, and finished it off with the same look she gave him as a boy when he’d shucked off his chores. It was a powerful look. Powerful enough to induce guilt in even the most rebellious teenagers.

“She’s really something, isn’t she?” came a voice at the door. 

He paused the video just as the Resistance Technologies logo began to spin on screen and glanced up. Rey stood in his door with her arms crossed, her hair knotted into messy mismatched buns with a mechanical pencil sticking out behind her ears. 

“Are you working late tonight?” he asked her, cautious enthusiasm flooding his stomach. Her smile was as tight as her white-knuckled fists and he watched her chest rise and fall with a huff.

“I was hoping to spitball a few things with you before you go home for the night. The other engineers have absolutely no imagination and what we really need is a biologist.” 

He ran his hand absently through his hair. He didn’t mind Rey, but Finn and Poe were overwhelming. Accusatory. A bit sanctimonious. He’d been on the wrong end of too many moldy-leftovers-in-the-breakroom-fridge related squabbles with the pair of them. 

Her eyes tracked his hands and he knew the moment she saw the hesitation flicker over his features. She put a slender finger up, stalling his excuse, and shut his door behind her. 

“We can talk in here, if you’d like. I need a break from the arguing going on in my half of the building.” 

She crossed the room and sat squarely on his mahogany desk. He sucked in a stuttering breath, and gave a shallow nod which caused her to beam at him. He loosened his tie around his throat. He was desperate for some cool air to chill his blood. She was rambling about interoffice politics, someone’s affair, and minor embezzlement from the design department. He didn’t have the heart to tell her he didn’t have a clue who most of the parties involved were. He spoke regularly to Hux, Phasma, and Rey. That was it.

He wondered if maybe she just liked his office. She stopped into his office at least once a week and fiddled with his collections. His shelves were lined with dusty anatomical models, antique equipment handed down from his mentors, and plant specimens he’d cultivated to be better acclimated to the climate of MOA-2011-BLG-262, or Endor, as the exo-moon and its companion system was affectionately called by the Resistance Tech scientists trying to paraterraform it. 

She delicately picked up his 1942 edition of _Astounding Science Fiction_ and flipped to the ‘Collision Orbit’ article. He watched her brows furrowing and arching as her eyes scanned the page. He swallowed his typical spiel about fingertip oils and the damage they did to old prints.

"I can’t believe you have a copy of this. It has to be worth a small fortune. Can you believe they really thought of terraforming over a hundred years ago?"

Ben snorted, "Yeah, Mars of all places." 

"It'd take at least 1,000 years alone to fix the atmosphere," she said.

"100,000 years with their shitty technology. What about space travel back then? That alone took years." He shivered at the thought of it. Growing to be so tall had made him skeptical of small spaces. Nevermind small spaces that were inescapable for years. 

She glanced up at him with an effervescent smile, eyes sparkling with humor and his throat felt dry. So dry. He snatched at his hydration bottle and fumbled it, resulting in an embarrassing _whoosh_ of water to splatter down his shirt front. She averted her gaze after only the briefest of gawking.

“What’s the problem you wanted help with?” he asked when he found his voice, cracking an octave like a damn teenager. He bit back the mocking internal monologue that flooded his mind and focused on the pretty hazel eyes before him. 

“It’s all practicality with the other engineers. Mission this, mission that. No one is considering the comforts of the mission. People will lose their minds isolated up there without any pleasures to keep them sane.” 

His cheeks and ears burned with her word choice, but he waited for her to expand. 

“We have med droids, tech droids, and labor droids, but I think we’re missing something. I think we should make more of an effort to customize the droids. Maybe even add personal droids in the living quarters.”

Ben wondered how this required a biologist. It definitely fell in line more with the engineers and the design team. He found himself nodding along though, not wanting to run her off. 

“What did you have in mind?” he asked, earning himself another grin. She clapped her hands together and hopped off the desk long enough to snag a stack of blank paper from his printer tray.

“I knew you’d be down. This is why you’re the best,” she told him as she yanked the mechanical pencil from behind her hair and began scribbling. He watched as she sketched out the basic outline of a standard R2-D2 droid. 

“It’ll be an expense that we’d have to justify,” Ben said as he watched Rey scratch out possible amenities. 

“You don’t think the team would go for it?” Rey’s hand stilled as she asked. 

“I think they would, but we should look into restructuring the droids to cut as much of the cost as possible. The BB series astromech droids are the most cost effective to produce. Why don’t we use their structure instead?” 

Ben shouldn’t have been surprised when he and Rey finally lifted their heads from her numerous sketches and amenities lists to find that midnight had come and gone and they only had a few hours before they’d be due back to work all over again. He walked her to her speeder and waved awkwardly as she pulled out of the lot. 

The remainder of the week was spent in much the same fashion before exhaustion got the better of them on Friday night. He watched her sleep for longer than was strictly appropriate between colleagues, but he did manage to finish the specs for the seasonal light therapy they were adapting from the med droids. 

“Rey, sweetheart, you need to go home,” he murmured gently, waking her from a puddle of drool on his desk. She wiped at her mouth and a hint of a blush dusted across her cheeks. 

“Sorry, I’m not much of a night owl,” she told him. She groggily stacked and sorted their notes.

“I’m not either. Maybe we should move our extracurricular activities to our lunch breaks?” he suggested. 

“That won’t be nearly enough time to get these designed and produced before we start doing launch checks. I could maybe meet on the weekends, but I’m sure you have better things to do,” she visibly deflated. 

“I don’t have anything better to do,” Ben assured her. 

“Really?” she perked up and his heart fluttered in response. 

“Nah, nothing important. Should I ask Mitaka to add weekend hours to our access cards or would you rather meet at my place?” Ben offered. 

“Your place,” she said quickly. 

“Okay,” he agreed. 

“Because this place is a ghost town on the weekends and it’s super creepy. Not because I want to poke through your stuff or anything,” she supplied. 

“I didn’t say you wanted to, but now that you mention it,” he teased. 

“I specifically said I don’t want to poke through your stuff,” she huffed. 

“Which means you were thinking about rummaging around. Weren’t you, you little scavenger?” he smirked, prompting an eye roll and a huff. She didn’t deny it this time though. 

True to form, she ravaged his apartment within minutes of arriving that weekend. She had opened every drawer in the kitchen, living room, and office under the guise of searching for a mechanical pencil. Proper engineers wouldn’t dare use a pen. Ever. He found it hard to believe that she didn’t have one with her. 

She balanced her piping hot coffee on her thigh. He apprehensively watched the dancing tendrils of steam evaporate as she tucked and untucked her mechanical pencil into her hair. She had teased him mercilessly when she’d found his calligraphy set, but he was pleased when she’d brought his sketchbook into the living room with them. 

They worked well together, sitting side-by-side on his sleek leather couch, her bare feet tucked partially under her and partially under him. She swore he was trying to freeze her out and that he was her own personal furnace, but the following week when he turned the thermostat up higher she still sat close to him.

“We don’t even need the thermo units on Endor. You’ll warm the entire station with all of this,” she said as she ran her hand across the thigh that was warming her toes. He choked on his spit at the contact and desperately hoped it passed for a laugh. 

“You are volunteering to go to Endor, right?” she asked him in a pensive voice. 

“I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about it,” he told her honestly. 

“I hope you do. I can’t imagine what I’d do without you there,” she said. They both blushed and if her hand lingered on his as they swapped files, he didn’t fixate on it too much. 

He saw her more frequently than any of the coworkers he shared his primary projects with. She shot him secret smiles in any joint meetings, knowing smirks when they passed in the hallways, and inside jokes tucked into the corner of the elevator as they left the office. There was an overwhelming, fuzzy feeling of belonging when he was with her. 

They got considerably less work done during their lunch breaks at the Resistance Tech offices than they did at his apartment. Rey often had meetings that ran over the allotted time and then some. She mildly chastised him when he’d poked fun at how verbose Poe was, but even she had to admit he never shut up. Rey devoured her lunch, usually greasy fast food, and then stole bites from his much healthier lunch.They fell easily into a routine of grossly invasive personal questions, gossip involving parties unknown to Ben, rants about popular culture, and the occasional update on their elective project.

It was during one of these lunch sessions that Rey came bounding into the breakroom with an orange and white ball of a droid. 

“Ben, meet BB-8! The first personal droid prototype! Poe swears it’s going to be his and Finn’s personal droid, but you and I have worked so hard on it. It’s going to be ours,” she gave him an impish grin and sat the droid down beside him. 

“Ours?” he croaked. 

“They can take him over my dead body. Say hello, Ben,” she wildly gesticulated toward the droid again. 

“Hello, BB-8,” Ben greeted the droid. 

BB-8 gave off a series of high-pitched squeals and spun around to greet him. Ben found himself incredibly proud. The multitude of programmable personalities had been a labor of love and several favors owed to Mitaka, but clearly it was worth it. 

“Ask him to do something!” she squealed. 

“Uh, okay, BB, dispose of this napkin,” he said as he handed the droid the napkin. The BB unit reached out, grasped the napkin, and then set it on fire. 

“That is the most _boring_ potential application for this amazing machinery. BB, would you mind cooking Ben and I some lunch?” she asked the droid. He whirred inside and moments later the droid opened up and served two platters. 

“Polystarch bread and veg-roast. Yum.” 

“Oh, hush. That’s what we’ll be eating on Endor until you get the biomass production system up and running,” she rolled her eyes, but bumped her hip playfully into him. He gave her a half smile. 

He didn’t know if he wanted to go to space or Endor or any of it, but he was pretty sure he’d follow her wherever she decided to go. 

Her holopad chirped and she frowned at it. 

“Shit, one of the test reactors may or may not have just exploded. Do you think you can watch BB-8 for the rest of the afternoon?”

He had real work to do and didn’t really have the time to babysit a droid, but his traitorous head was nodding anyway. 

“You’re the best,” she told him as she stood on her tiptoes to plant a hurried kiss on his cheek. 

“Whatever you do, don’t let Poe kidnap him!”

He watched her jog away from him in a dreamy stupor until someone cleared their throat from behind him. Hux stared at him in disbelief. 

“Solo, you can’t wait until you’re in space before you make a move.”

“Why not?” Ben tore his eyes from Rey’s retreating figure to meet the gaze of the incredulous ginger. 

“Because knowing you, you’ll sabotage the mission because you’d rather die than put yourself out there. She likes you. Go for it.”

“I wouldn’t sabotage the mission,” Ben grumbled halfheartedly. 

“Tell her. Now. On Earth,” Hux said, pushing the droid prototype into Ben’s arms and walking down the hall. 

_Tell her now._

His brain seemed to short circuit around the idea of it. 

_Tell her now._

Now slipped by a few days, a few weeks, and then months at a time. It was late one night and Ben was working on his plants when she slipped into his office. She slid onto his desk, her legs dangling between his. 

_Tell her now._

“The mission applications were sent out today,” she said by way of greeting. 

“Oh,” he grunted. He’d been too busy to check his inbox. 

“I was wondering if you were going to fill it out. I know you’ve been on the fence about the whole space travel thing.”

“I don’t know. Are you going to?” he asked, saving his work to study her. 

“That’s why I’m asking. That depends on if you’re going or not.”

He stared at her in wonder. She wouldn’t meet his gaze. She studied her hands, his desk, the plants.

“Rey, I…” he searched for the words and she didn’t fill the blackhole of silence. As the seconds ticked by he could feel her anxiety ratchet up with his own. 

“I’m going if you’re going,” he said at last. She jumped up from his desk and pulled him into a tight hug. He pressed his nose into her hair and savored the moment. When she pulled back, tears pricked at the corners of her eyes. 

“Hey, hey, hey, why are you crying?” he shushed the quiet sobs and wiped her tears with his thumb. 

“I’m so relieved. I’d hate to miss this opportunity, but I couldn't stand to leave you behind,” she said burying her face in his chest.

“Rey, you have to know that I’d follow you anywhere in the universe. You have to know…”

She puffed against his neck, “I know.”

His lips hovered inches above hers, hesitating, before her lips gently brushed against his. He kissed her again, but she met him with all the fire of a burning star. The breath was knocked out of him as her hands collided with his chest, knocking him back into his chair and she straddled his lap. Her hands grasped the collar of his shirt, holding him close to her. His palms slipped under her shirt and up his back. The world disappeared as they became lost in one another. 

When at last he could no longer ignore the desperate cry for air from his lungs, he pulled back and rested his forehead against hers. 

“Not to be pushy, but I think we should file for joint quarters on Endor,” Rey laughed. 

“I could live with that.” 

**Author's Note:**

> stay tuned for smuuuuut!


End file.
